BY LOIS WADSWORTH
Spy Story
Idealism, realism and skewed loyalties.
CLEVER GIRL: ELIZABETH BENTLEY,
THE SPY WHO USHERED IN THE
MCCARTHY ERA by Lauren Kessler. Harper Collins,
2003. Hardcover, $26.95.
“
C
lever Girl” was the code name
the Soviets gave American spy
Elizabeth Bentley in cablegrams
sent from Russian embassies in the U.S.
back to Mother Russia before and during
WWII. U.S. Army intelligence cracked the
top-secret Venona codes in the early 1940s,
although the project did not become pub-
licly known until the mid-1990s. Beginning
in 1945, the FBI used information gleaned
from the decoded cables to verify Bentley’s
testimony concerning the two large,
Communist espionage networks she ran.
Much to its surprise, the FBI learned
through Venona that Bentley was telling the
truth.
In far-reaching, voluntary testimony,
Bentley named 80 American citizens, some
in highly placed governmental positions,
who were active in her spy rings. She testi-
fied about individuals with Communist af-
filiations before congressional committees
and grand juries well into the 1950s, even
though she was much too good a spy to have
kept any of the documents they passed her.
True, her testimony led to the excesses of
the McCarthy era, but Bentley’s role was
pivotal in explaining how the collection and
distribution of classified documents
worked.
Eugene author and UO journalism Prof.
Lauren Kessler tells Bentley’s dramatic
story in the light of Venona’s evidence that
the Soviets were spying on the U.S. govern-
ment throughout the 1930s and ‘40s. There
was a Communist conspiracy. There were
actual spies in the government sending sen-
sitive papers through U.S.S.R. operatives to
Moscow. Venona, in turn, has also been cor-
roborated by the post-Cold War release in
Moscow of some document archives.
Throughout Bentley’s career as a former
spy, she maintained the fiction that she was
misled, taken advantage of by her older,
well-connected lover, a senior Russian
agent, and those he worked for. However,
Kessler brings forward strong support for a
different conclusion: Bentley was a de-
voted, idealistic Communist, who knew
what she was doing when she came forward
on her own to volunteer
as a spy. After her
lover’s death, the
KGB people Bentley
reported to took away
Lauren
Kessler
the networks and con-
tacts he had left in her
care. In fear of the KGB
— she was actually on an
assassination list at one
time — Bentley called the FBI
and spilled the beans. As Kessler
writes:
“… her story is more complicated —
and far more interesting — than the sum of
her personal imperfections. It is a story of
good intentions gone bad, of skewed loyal-
ties, of a past that could not be outrun no
matter how long the race. It is the story of a
woman who lived a life much bigger than
the one to which she was born — and who
paid the price.”
Bentley’s story is fascinating because
she came from a New England family that
all but guaranteed her membership in the
Daughters of the American Revolution had
she not turned out to be a notorious “Red
Spy Queen.” Liberally educated at Vassar to
teach at elite private schools, Bentley spent
1933 in Italy, where both her sexuality and
political awareness caught fire. Strongly in-
fluenced by the effects of Mussolini’s fas-
cism on ordinary Italians, Bentley was fur-
ther distressed by her return to New York in
1934, when the Great Depression was in
full swing. Unable to find work and without
family to support her, Bentley fell enthusi-
astically into the arms of the American
Communist Party, where she had many
friends and lovers, for the only time in her
life.
Kessler shows the gradual unbending of
this upright Puritan patrician into a woman
whose superficial appearance belied the in-
tense, secret life she led. Through her party
activities, Bentley met powerful men, some
of whom tried to recruit her as a spy. But she
became active when an older man she knew
only as Yasha, one of the movement’s top
men, told her to cut off her other friends,
move to a different apartment, give up her
party meetings and report solely to him.
When they fell in love, Yasha recognized
that Bentley had the energy he was lacking.
He taught her to spy. This was all highly un-
professional and dangerous for
him as a Soviet operative. As
Kessler writes:
“By being together,
they were not just
breaking society’s
code but also party
regulations and es-
pionage tradecraft.
It was a heady com-
bination. She was
drunk on it. … They
were living, as some-
one later put it, in bour-
geois sin and Leninist bliss.”
Because Joe McCarthy, Roy
Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon
were such rabid anticommunist right-
wingers, I find it startling to learn that alle-
gations of Communists in the government
spying for the Russians were not all bogus.
In a recent interview, Kessler said some of
the Communists Bentley named were not
trying to undermine the U.S. government,
per se. Some of them “saw that Great
Britain was getting all this intelligence from
the U.S., but the U.S.S.R., our World War II
ally, was not.”
Kessler makes clear the multilayered
context in which the fevered McCarthy Era
thrived. She reports the exploits of the most
powerful woman operative in the KGB but
also shows Bentley as a flawed, lonely
woman whose passions ran deep but whose
survival depended on calm, calculated self-
denial. Clever Girl is a brilliant portrait of
this complicated personality.
Kessler’s complex understanding is
based on extensive, careful research. She
read from files available in a special FBI
reading room in D.C. that holds a vast
amount of data. She also collected as much
oral history as she could, she said in a recent
interview with EW. “I found almost every-
one involved in Bentley’s case who’s still
alive,” she said, noting that some of the FBI
guys “are pretty long-lived.” Hearings at
which Bentley testified are public records
Kessler accessed through the UO.
“There was lots of press coverage —
Life, Time, Newsweek,” Kessler said. “She
was on ‘Meet the Press’ on radio, so I could
hear her voice, and she was the first female
guest on ‘Meet the Press’ on live television,
before videotape.”
Something tragic clings to this woman
who fell into history and shaped events that
have come to define an entire American era.
As Kessler said, “There were many conse-
quences for Elizabeth Bentley of trying to
lead a meaningful life.”
Kessler has written 10 books, including
the Los Angeles Times bestseller, The
Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and
Times of Pancho Barnes. She directs the
UO literary nonfiction graduate program.
Kessler reads and signs Clever Girl at 7 pm
Tuesday, Aug. 12 at the UO Browsing
room. Kessler is Alan Siporin’s guest on
KLCC’s “Critical mass” on Sunday,
August 10.
ew
BOOK NOTES Aug. 7 – Sept. 28:
Dean Van Leuven (Life Without
Anger) reads and signs books at 7 pm. Aug. 7 at Barnes & Noble. …Safiya
Bukhari (Lest We Forget; Soul of the BLA) and Ward Churchill (A Little Matter
of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas) speak at 8 pm Aug. 8 at the
United Lutheran Church. For info, (541) 520-5401. …Poets Matthew Dickman,
Michael Dickman, David Elsey and Nico Alvarado Greenwood read at 7 pm
Aug. 10 at Mountain Writers Center, Portland, $3. (503) 236-4854. …Twenty-
nine local authors discuss and sign books at the Oregon Authors Table at the
Lane County Fair Aug. 12-17. …Elizabeth Engstrom reads from Black Leather
and talks about writing the erotic thriller at 7 pm Aug. 14 at Barnes & Noble.
…Suzanne Hansen (You’ll Never Nanny in this Town Again!) reads at 7 pm Aug.
27 at Barnes & Noble. …Seattle author Dolly Mae reads from Choosing Joy in
the Midst of Crisis at 7 pm Aug. 28 at Barnes & Noble. … Portland Arts and
Lectures Series upcoming events include Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist
Jeffrey Eugenides Sept 30; novelist Sandra Cisneros Oct. 28; memoirist, nov-
elist and short-story writer Tobias Wolff Dec. 2; U.S. Poet Laureate Billy
Collins Jan. 14, 2004; cartoonists Matt Groening and Lynda Barry Mar. 18;
and British novelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan April 1. All events at 7:30 pm
in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Tickets: (503) 227-2583.
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